Hello Sunshine

With summer comes sunshine and flip-flops and for my two boys LOTS of outdoors (although mommy is so NOT an outdoor person). That being said I do love my flip-flops and the sun isn't so bad either. I decided to play along with PTI's Make-It-Mondays (MIM) challenge this week using sunshine and flips-flops as my theme. Nichole gave several sketches we could choose from and I foudn that (that I tweaked just slightly):

With last month's release I had gotten several things and two of them were the flip-flop stamps (with dies) and the Farm & Barn set. I had already stamped and embossed the big sentiment onto vellum from another project and decided that this was the time to use it. I trimed the width of the card down to 3.75" so that I could have the vellum wrap around one side of the card and hang off of the other side. I knew I wanted some sunshine color behind the sentiment but didn't want the whole card that color so I got my thinking cap on. After several minutes went by (ok, I was watching PBS's Sherlock Homes - oh my gosh that is a great show - and got hooked) it came to me: wooden decks! These lovely decks are outside in the sunshine. Wouldn't that be great (yes, I am not the first to come up with the idea and that's ok) but how to impliment it when I still  want my yellow/orange color behind the sentiment. Did I mention that I was trying to achieve a card with as little layers as possible? Here's how I achieved the look: sticky notes and two scored lines. I scored where I wanted my sunshine color to be and then masked it off with thin sticky backed paper (think large sticky note). I sponged on Distress Ink's Old Paper and then used Frayed Burlap for the wooden beams (I am loving this background). Once that was dried I used sticky notes to mask the "deck" and sponged on Distress Ink's Mustered Seed and Spice Marmalade for my color behind the sentiment. What I really liked about this sponging technique is that the rised embossed lines stayed white so it worked as a great frame for the veleum sentiment banner. For the smaller sentiment undernead I just heat embossed it in white (the small sentiment is from TSG's Day & Night set). Once I got the background the rest came together quickly. The flip-flops were die cut out, stamped, and put together. The color of choice was DI's Festive Berries (again, I really need to get the newest seasonal colors). For the flower I swiped the pad on some scrap white c/s and then die cut the flowers out using small pearls for the center.